IP multicast is widely used for data/media distribution purposes because it allows efficient use of network resources to deliver data from one or more sources to multiple receivers. Many application systems are adopting this technology to distribute bandwidth-intensive data to save the network resources and therefore lowering the network cost for such application. However, the performance for multicast applications are often out of the control of application itself. Without proper management, multicasting can be harmful to network performance.
Therefore, it is desirable to provide a management framework for multicast intensive systems to manage the multicast sessions, address allocation, routing path computation, multicast security, and network resource utilizations.